Set Review: 21105 The Village

[Ektris]

(Note: This is a repost of a lost review, so some content is out-of-date.)

 

Presentation

From the design of the box to the instruction manual, these are the first things you see before building the set.

 

The design of the box should come as no surprise to those who have seen the original Minecraft set. But! This time, it's a wooden plank! It shows off the set and the micromobs and the back advertises LEGO Cu-… wait. It advertises the other two Minecraft sets?

 

Cuusoo is mentioned nowhere in this set. So very much unlike its predecessor, Cuusoo #3 Minecraft, The Village and its sister set The Nether are one hundred percent their own line. The original is even retroactively added to it according to the instructions here, now labeled “The Forest.”

 

Anyways, once you bring yourself to pop the box open, you'll be presented with two instruction booklets, a brick separator, and six bags of parts.

 

Building

Half the fun is had building the set. How fun is it to build and how easy or challenging is it?

 

So you want to build The Village, huh? Better give yourself plenty of time, because although it's simple and straightforward, being entirely composed of tiles and plates means you've got a lot of pieces to sift through. Seriously, you'll be pulling from all six bags in some steps; placement for some parts seems pretty random and will take some digging.

 

That said, the build also isn't anything exciting, especially if you've already built The Forest. It felt altogether far too similar, but I guess that should have been expected. Even if you haven't, after you've build one corner, you know what to expect with the other three. I did find piecing together the mineshaft elements and villager homes to be pretty fun though, and the couple of removable walls were unexpected.

 

Set Design

Now that the set is complete, we can critique how it looks from every angle. New or interesting pieces can also be examined here

 

There are actually some new molds here! The 1x2 plate with 1 stud finally gets the mold change it always needed - you can actually plug in any stud underneath it now, not just the hollow ones.

 

Besides that, there's plenty of awesome colors included, plenty of extra pieces, and of course the printed tiles for the mobs. Even on the original Steve, I thought they did a really good job with the mob face coming together on the sides of several tiles, and I still think so here. Although I must admit the zombie being two shades of green looks rather weird.

 

The Village fits in really well with the established Minecraft microworld. There's not much more to it than that. It feels like it belongs and very much looks like the expansion it's meant to be.

 

Playability

The other half of the fun is in playing with the set. How well does the set function and is it enjoyable to play with?

 

The Village looks pretty good, but much like the house built in The Forest, I'm very disappointed that the micromobs can't go inside. You can still make some nice dioramas, especially if you make use of the pretty cool mineshaft in the underground layer.

 

We can also finally make use of the axle holes in The Forest without buying duplicate sets to expand our world:

 

Final Thoughts

Once it’s all said and done, how does the set stack up? Should I get it?

 

Pros

What’s to like?

• Tons of pieces
• Tons of colors
• More Minecraft is always a good thing.

Cons

What’s not to like?

• The build is too similar to The Forest.
• We've got enough extra tiles to make extra mob heads, so why not just intentionally double them so we have bodies too?
• Seriously, I want two pigs. How can you not love that face?

A big draw here is also building your own world. Now, I like my Minecraft vanilla - no mods here - so I'll be doing the same with my sets, since really I got them as display pieces. But for those of you with creative minds, you've got a plethora of options.

 

It's also pretty cool to grow our overall number of mobs. I would love to complete the micromob collection and have some more unique biomes. When I learned of The Village and The Nether's existence, I was ecstatic. However, The Village really does fall short. Except for the mobs, it's just not adding much new. I could only recommend it for those seriously into the theme. Still, I hope The Village and The Nether sell well so we can get even more released in the brand new Minecraft line.